ChronoZoom takes you through 14 billion years of space-time via HTML5

This dynamic atlas of time takes you from the universe's origins to now.

Yesterday, Microsoft Research, Russia's Moscow State University, and UC Berkeley launched ChronoZoom, a dynamic atlas of time. It is not meant to direct travel so much as direct an imaginative exploration of history, writ large.

With the Web-based ChronoZoom, you can move from the "Stelliferous Epoch" to the present day with the flick of a slider. Each major era is pegged down with colored dialogue boxes you can click for multimedia explanations. These include the origins of the Universe and the first stars, the advent of life, agriculture, and the modern world.

When you click one, you can zoom in on that time (hence the name ChronoZoom) and a number of videos appear embedded in the bubble of time you select. For the origin of life, for instance, you can listen to David Christian explain the "Goldilocks conditions" necessary for life and consult a bibliography on the subject. Click on "The Origins of the Modern World" and you are flown through time, passing through graphical structures containing Life, Human Prehistory, and Humanity before coming to rest at the "Threshold" of the modern, 1,000 C.E.

The initial interface is sectioned in two, with the Cosmos occupying four-fifths of the UI and Earth and the Solar System occupying all of the remaining fifth, but for a sliver—and that sliver is us. Some may be daunted to see the data of our insignificance visualized so graphically. Others may be legitimately moved by the amount of time it took to ready the universe for Shakespeare, the DynaTAC, neurosurgery, and flan.

Of course, what if this is just a molecule-thick sheet of time compared to what's to come?

In addition to video and bibliographies, this project provides users with audio and articles on relevant topics.

The project is described as "an open source community project dedicated to visualizing the history of everything to bridge the gap between the humanities and sciences using the story of Big History to easily understand all this information."

It started when Roland Saekow took Walter Alvarez's "Big History" class at Berkeley. The two worked together to make the paper timelines Alvarez used more dynamic, eventually turning to the university's Office of Intellectual Property and Industry Research Alliances for funding to create a much more complete, more dynamic, and shareable timeline. IPIRA connected them with Micosoft and a viable early iteration was born. The team rebuilt the timeline on Windows Azure and HTML5. But to really make the timeline dynamic, they needed math. Lots of it. So they enlisted a development team from Moscow State University, who dovetailed Jscript with the site, creating the fluid motions in the time stream.

"With ChronoZoom," Saekow told Ars, "you can browse history, rather than digging it out piece by piece. Also, today with [fewer and fewer] students visiting the library, the serendipity of browsing for a book and finding another is something we hope ChronoZoom can restore. If you don't know what to search for, it's almost like that topic never existed."

Now comes the time in the project's development where open source comes into its own.

"We envision a world where scientists, researchers, students, and teachers collaborate through ChronoZoom to share information via data, tours, and insight," the ChronoZoom team writes. "Imagine a world where the leading academics publish their findings to the world in a manner that can easily be accessed and compared to other data. We will be focusing on community development of features, capabilities, and content."

The team is asking users to fill out a survey and vote for features they would like to see implemented in future versions of the site.

Among the possibilities for that set are the ability to create a personal timeline or tour, to generate internal bookmarks and to generate a chart and place it into the timeline. Documentation on the project is found on its CodePlex page.

Curt Hopkins
Curt writes for Ars Technica about the intersection of culture and technology, including the democratization of information, spaceships, robots, the theatre, archaeology, achives and free speech. Twitter@curthopkins